He was already beyond the Forestry Building and its columns of tree trunks left in their natural states. Its bark-thatched roof took on a bit of the sunset’s red glow, a pretty sight the veteran showed no signs of noticing as he made for the canal that connected the South Pond to the South Inlet. Moving briskly, he and the porter crossed onto the half-mile Pier, bypassing the majestic Casino to head for the Movable Sidewalk.
That was a mercy: Neva’s fatigue had quickly reasserted itself as she continued looking behind as much as ahead. Columbian Guards—in uniform or out—White Chapel Club members, crescent-marked insects: there was so much to avoid, so much to be aware of. But the Sidewalk consisted of two enormous, electrically driven belts. The first moved at two miles an hour and allowed passengers to stand or walk; the second supported rows and rows of benches and moved at four miles an hour. Either would let her rest.
Neva hung back as the veteran paid for a one-way-trip and directed the porter to move them onto the first belt. After they’d been carried a sufficient distance, she flashed her exhibitor’s pass and boarded behind them, safely obscured by a screen of other passengers.
It was a smooth ride today. The belts were said to be less reliable than those used at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris—a sore point for Director Burnham. But the sidewalk rolled forward without a hitch, ferrying its complacent cargo across the Pier and over Lake Michigan. At the end of the Pier waited the steamer the veteran would take to downtown Chicago. The trip along the shoreline was said to be enchanting.
Neva doubted the veteran would notice.
From what she could see, he was growing more and more agitated, berating the porter for some reason and jabbing at the steamer. Perhaps he wanted the porter to push the chair along the belt to increase their speed? But then why had they boarded the slower sidewalk? Was that why he was angry?
Neva looked back at the Fair. The white buildings of the Court of Honor had become a brilliant canvas splashed with the early-evening sky’s pinks and reds. The sight was almost enough to make her forget her circumstances.
Except she still wasn’t sure why she’d revealed her rashes to the veteran. Or why she was following him now. He wouldn’t lead her to Augie, wouldn’t deign to help her in any way. And—
A shout up ahead pulled Neva’s eyes back to her quarry, just in time to see the porter reach down, rip the veteran’s good leg off at the hip, and cast the jerking limb into Lake Michigan.
Chapter Six
A PERFECT, CRIMSON arc hung in the air for a moment before the nearest woman screamed. A second shrieked when the veteran fell out of his chair trying to stem the gushing of his new stump. Then the porter put his fingers to his lips, tasted the blood upon them, closed his eyes ...
And all was bedlam.
Those closest to him pulled back so violently that at least two men fell from the Pier. Passengers ahead of the porter ran pell-mell down the Movable Sidewalk toward the steamer; passengers behind him jumped aboard the return belts and sprinted back to the Casino. One girl leapt from bench to bench before she lost her balance and tumbled into the arms of a shouting old man. An even younger boy tried to run the wrong way on the fast belt, stopping only when a woman scooped him up and set him on the unmechanized portion of the Pier, where he bolted like a rabbit.
Neva’s first impulse had taken her several steps toward the veteran, but he’d already stopped moving. And while most of her wanted nothing more than to flee like everyone else, the porter was pulling something out of his pocket, a bit of cloth trimmed in white and patterned by a colorful, repeating tessellation.
A design that looked very like the one adorning the handkerchief Dob had blown his nose with by the Women’s Building.
The porter used the cloth to dab his lips and beard. When his eyes opened, they were wide with ecstasy. But his expression rapidly changed to wariness, and then ... recognition.
He’d seen Neva.
Before she could react, the porter turned and ran toward the ferry, cut back, hurdled the fence separating the east- and westbound portions of the Sidewalk, and raced past on the fast belt. To her surprise, she followed.
It felt foolish from the first footfall, and even more so with each subsequent stride. Why hop a fence to chase someone who had the strength to dismember a man and the savagery to taste his spurting blood? But that handkerchief was either Dob’s or a perfect match—maybe his mother’s? And if either were true, perhaps the porter was also responsible for Augie’s disappearance. Or so Neva rationalized as she tailed the killer off the Sidewalk, past the Casino, and into the Court of Honor, where refugees from the Pier were sparking a general panic.
“Murder on the Pier!” bellowed a man sprinting into the Court.
“They’re eating people!” shrieked a woman close behind.
Many people thought this some sort of performance. Others understood the fear as genuine. Some froze, and some shouted questions, but a goodly number spooked faster than a herd of cattle, stampeding away from the lake and toward the Terminal Railway Station at the end of the court.
The scene became even more surreal when the lights switched on.
White bulbs lined all the great buildings, and every night, they flared to life at the same time, a brilliance accented by the inner illumination of the Columbian Fountain and the appearance of roving, colored spotlights. Normally the crowd reacted with delight—for many, the Fair was their first experience with electricity. Tonight, the sudden radiance just highlighted how quickly wonder had turned to terror.
Neva could see it to either side of her as she splashed through the Basin and shouldered her way past the Administration Building. On her right, a young man moved to catch his fainting sweetheart, only to miss her when a family of four burst between them, holding hands and charging hard. On Neva’s left, a cluster of women bowled over two Columbian Guards trying to restore order. Straight ahead, scores of fairgoers swarmed the Terminal Station and overwhelmed its turnstiles.
Details had yet to spread, however. No one took special notice of the porter or Neva as they slipped behind the Station. But the tumult made others unremarkable as well—she had no notion Wiley was running beside her until he put his hand on her shoulder.
“Come with me,” the Boer panted, his accent thickened by exertion.
She veered away before he could tighten his grip.
“Neva!” he yelled as he closed the distance between them again. “It’s not safe!”
Still running, she pointed ahead of her with one hand while fending off Wiley with the other. “There!” The porter had just passed the Hygeia Cooling Plant. “There’s your killer!”
Wiley shook his head and reached for her again.
She stopped long enough to let him lunge in front of her, then pushed him farther forward. “It’s him! He tore a man’s leg off!”
The porter glanced back at the same instant a rose spotlight swept across him, shading the blood staining his beard and hand a deeper, shinier crimson. Upon seeing Wiley—and Wiley’s uniform—he darted into the nearest building: Cold Storage.
Neva gave Wiley another shove. “It’s Leather Apron!” She sprang ahead again, only to be pulled back.
“Stay here,” Wiley ordered before sprinting toward Cold Storage’s entrance.
She followed anyway. He might mean well, but it wasn’t his brother that was missing.
Cold Storage’s ice rink wasn’t as crowded as it had been during the summer. But there were still plenty of tourists for Wiley and Neva to thread through as they chased the porter past the skate-rental booth and onto the ice. He didn’t seem to need skates—even dodging gliding fairgoers, he ran almost as fast as he had through the Court of Honor, never slipping.
Wiley wasn’t so lucky.
A girl skating at reckless speed clipped him after his first two steps, and in trying to steady himself, he nearly dragged down two thoroughly disgruntled gentlemen. Neva trusted to her dancer’s training to keep her balanced while she focused on
the porter: he was already across the rink, yanking open a door marked “Fair Personnel Only” and shooting through it.
Neva did the same moments later, rushing inside what turned out to be a cavernous boiler room open all the way to the building’s sixth story. Three immense machines dominated the space, all banging away—probably to power the refrigeration units. The porter had begun climbing a ladder on the far side.
“Neva!” shouted Wiley as he entered behind her, the frost on his elbows and knees melting quickly in the intense heat. “What are you doing?”
She pointed to the ladder and bounded towards it. “Up there!”
But Wiley’s hands found purchase on her shoulders again. “If he is who you say he is, you shouldn’t be chasing him!”
Neva clenched her jaw against the coming pain and bent her shoulder bones, flattening their ridges to a snake-like smoothness. Wiley’s fingers fell away as she slithered free and sprinted to the ladder. “He might know where Augie is!”
She made it up several rungs before she felt Wiley jump on below—the ladder shook with the force of his climbing. They both sustained a breakneck pace, but the porter had the advantage by several stories, and he reached the upper platform well ahead of them. After glancing down, he opened the lone door and vanished through it.
Neva pulled herself onto the platform a half-minute later and vaulted through the doorway. She landed on the roof in a crouch, raising her hands in case she needed to bend their bones into shields.
But the porter had vanished. And she smelled smoke.
The siren atop the Machinery Hall blared as Wiley emerged behind her. “It’s the tower,” he growled, gesturing above them. Cold Storage actually had three towers, but he was jabbing at the closest, which had been erected on the building’s west side to conceal the boilers’ unsightly smokestack. “There’s a gap between the top of the stack and the cupola, just above the third landing. It’s like ending the chimney in the attic instead of above the roof. Bastards were supposed to fix it after the flare-up in June.”
Whatever they’d done hadn’t worked: smoke issued out of the west tower from every window.
Neva raced to the roof’s edge, scanning for the porter as she went. “A fire engine’s on its way,” she said, motioning to the Court of Honor, where one of the Fair’s horse-drawn wagons labored to navigate the still-disorderly crowd. “And I see the Fire Boat in the Lagoon.”
“It’s too far for the Boat’s hoses.” Wiley moved cautiously to her side; he seemed less than comfortable standing on the building’s precipice. “They’ll have to lug them to the roof and scale the tower to the second landing—that’s what they did this summer. Come on. We need to get down.”
“Not yet. Where’s the porter?”
“Getting to safety, if he has any sense. As we should be. The staircase in the north tower should be clear. I’ll see you down and then come back up to help. Now, if you please ...”
Neva took Wiley’s arm and raised it to point at the west tower again. “There: on the second landing. You see him?”
The porter was traversing a narrow ledge, smoke and flame billowing from the windows above and below him.
Chapter Seven
“FLAMING HELL,” WILEY said, without irony, and took a step toward the burning tower. “Why on Earth did he climb that? It must have already been smoking.”
Neva watched the porter scramble around a corner. “He’s panicked.”
“Because he’s a fool.” Wiley took off his coat and held it out to her. “Wear this on the stairs—it’ll keep the soot off.”
She shook her head. “We need to get him down.”
“I will get him down. You need to meet the other guards and tell them what’s happening.” He waggled the coat. “Please.”
Neva observed the porter for another moment and nodded. “Keep your coat—you’ll need the protection more than me.” After nudging Wiley towards the west tower, she sprinted to its northern counterpart and raced down to the fifth floor, where she nearly ran into several Columbian Guards hauling up immense coils of rope.
“The killer from the Pier is trapped on the west tower,” Neva said as the breathless guards indicated she should make way for them. “Wiley went up after him.”
“Noble idiot,” one of the guards muttered.
“Get clear!” another barked before pounding past her.
She descended a few more steps—just enough to be convincing—before doubling back and trailing the guards onto the roof. The men ran to the west tower and set the coils of rope at its base. Then they broke into teams. The first stayed on the main roof and threw one end of each rope to the fire-wagons mustering below; the second team took the ropes’ other ends, fastened them about their waists, and began climbing the lowest of the three wooden ladders attached to the tower’s exterior.
“Wiley!” yelled one of the climbers. “Get your rusty guts back here!”
Wiley waved from the second landing. Then he pointed at the third and swung onto the ladder that led to it. Hopefully he knew where the porter had gone—their quarry had vanished.
Judging that everyone else on the roof was occupied, Neva abandoned the concealment of a small vent stack and dashed for the west tower. Several guards were still on the first ladder, but she didn’t need it. And scaling the north side should hide her from Wiley and his brethren.
Latching onto the tower’s decorative carvings, she adjusted the fit of her hands to each hold by imagining a cat extending and retracting its claws. The bending hurt worse than usual: she was moving fast enough that her finger bones often had to bear her weight before they’d finished reforming. She couldn’t let the porter die, though. Not without learning what he knew about the blue-trimmed handkerchief—and Augie.
Bending her toes would help. But as she kicked off her shoes, someone below called out about a “Negress on the tower!” Neva glanced down. An enormous crowd had gathered to watch the firefighting efforts.
Thousands of fairgoers gawked at the Cold Storage Building, the panic in the Court of Honor replaced by morbid curiosity. Some balanced awkwardly on skates—the ice rink must have been evacuated with no time to change. Other onlookers held bits of food, likely carried out from nearby restaurants.
The crowd cheered when the first hose—attached to one of the ropes the guards had thrown down—began to rise, hauled up by the team on the main roof. Neva continued her own ascent as quickly as she could without seeming unnatural. Her progress still drew plenty of commentary, however, and one of the guards who’d reached the first landing tried to grab her as she passed. She dodged by sliding around the tower’s far corner and onto the side with a sheer drop to the grounds. The crowd gasped, its collective inhalation audible even at such a height.
The crowd repeated the sound when the porter appeared on the third landing. Backed by fire and smoke, he strode to the top of the ladder Wiley had almost finished scaling, braced himself against the cupola, and shoved, bursting the topmost bolts in another display of superhuman strength.
As the crowd screamed, a rifle shot rang out, and the porter grabbed his stomach. But the marksman on the main roof had fired too late: after a moment of frozen, eerie stasis, the ladder swung from the tower, arcing Wiley into space.
He let go of the rung he’d been clinging to and spread his arms, perhaps aiming to snag one of the ropes the upper team of guards had looped around the first landing’s pillars. Yet it was Neva who saved him: the third ladder had been attached to the north side of the tower, and after scrambling around the corner again, she leaned out, extended her right arm an extra six inches—until it was nearly the length of a chimp’s—and caught Wiley’s forearm.
Stopping his momentum jolted her terribly. But she’d anchored herself by molding her left fingers into the tower like roots into a mountainside and braced for the strain by visualizing her skeleton as a spiderweb: elastic enough to give as the load hit, yet strong enough to hold firm after.
Even so, she nearly
dropped him.
Neva couldn’t bend her right hand’s fingers fast enough—all the fracturing and reforming was taking its toll, and the pincher-like grip she’d intended didn’t quite materialize. Fortunately, Wiley clasped her forearm before he slipped. The crowd went berserk, hollering their approval and slapping each other on the back. They cheered louder still when the upper team of guards hauled a hose to the first landing and began spraying water past the second landing and onto the third, which was now engulfed in riotous flames.
“How?” asked Wiley as Neva pulled him against the tower.
She leaned forward to hide the contraction of her right arm. “I’m stronger than I look. Do you see the porter?”
He glanced up, but steam created by the hoses—two more spurted at the third landing now—had filled in the few spaces smoke hadn’t already obscured. “No.” He shook his head, looking more than a little dazed. “You’re not even tied in ... Thank you.”
“Come on.” She began climbing again, but he risked his new purchase to grab her ankle.
“Down. We need to go down—not up.”
“You need to go down. I’m a better climber.”
“Then don’t make me come after you.” Wiley squeezed her ankle. “Please: he’s as good as dead.”
She resisted the impulse to kick away his hand. “I saved you.”
“And he’s worth saving too? Let him burn.”
“He can burn after he tells me where Augie is.”
The guards raised another hose to the first landing and targeted the third. More steam resulted.
“Neva ...” Wiley paused and pressed his face to the tower. “Do you feel that?”
“I feel your hand still on my foot.”
Witch in the White City: A Dark Historical Fantasy/Mystery (Neva Freeman Book 1) Page 4
